Tesla vs SpaceX, Humanoid Robots, Online Dating, Retro Electronics

48:30Yeah, the games are not going to stop. Exactly. You can be getting steamrolled by a hurricane in Florida and betting on Chinese tennis futures, right? Yeah, the outcome of a cricket game. Right, right. What's happening in the soccer world? Yeah, and I would hope that if somebody's in India, eventually getting approached by some storm that they would be making risky bets on stuff that's happening here. Exactly. So he has some stiff competition. We got Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX, who is reporting to federal prison today to serve seven and a half years on campaign finance fraud charges, posted this on LinkedIn today.

49:19I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as inmate at FCI Cumberland. Who do you give it to between these two? Posting that you're going to jail on LinkedIn is pretty iconic. Does it deserve technology brother of the week though? I think we got to save brother of the week when he comes back and starts a world positive venture. There we go. And announces that hopefully generates billions of dollars in returns for shareholders and uses that to sort of pay back the victims of FTX. I think brother of the week has to go to this guy. Okay. We'll put his name up. Maybe I'll link the video.

49:56Cole Hausen. Cole Hausen. Cole Hausen. You are officially the brother of the week. One of the first brothers of the week. Okay. And hopefully he's still alive. Yeah. Because there's small chance that he didn't make it. If he is alive, if he is alive, we know that he's still sports betting and encouraging other people to follow suit. Yeah. What do you think of this concept? there's a company called back market that is selling older technology and encouraging you to downgrade so they're reintroducing the iphone 6s se 11 12 13 mini 14 refurbished and they're also selling um what looks like an old sony hd handy cam camcorder and uh tyler here says fascinating concept and really good name imagine something similar may happen with software what's your reaction i mean this is so this is a phenomenally viral 50 000 likes on this like there is serious demand for for nostalgic tech it was shocking i mean like it is a great ad and this goes this goes into almost every technology consumer tech product has been over engineered like all i want is for Sonos to release a super analog version of their product that doesn't require me to sync four different speakers and spend an hour and a half setting it up.

51:25And then right as I'm having people over, two of the speakers get disconnected. And I'm just like, could I just run an extension cord between all of these and just let them run, right? So I think things have been over-engineered. You're seeing this in ultra-luxury cars that almost all the most, I think we've maybe even talked about this, going back to analog bugattis are intentionally have these very tactile switches the utopia i think the most interesting thing about this is even after all these years of people trying to unbundle craigslist and unbundle ebay there's still opportunities to unbundle these businesses so bezel uh is a company i back that that's like the stock x of watches right now ebay is still the number one seller of luxury watches online, the issue with eBay is that you could spend$20 ,000 on a Patek, actually not gonna get the kind of Pateks we like for 20, but let's say you're gonna spend$60 ,000 on a Patek, if there's a 25 % chance that it's fake, that's not really a risk that anybody should take.

52:34And so they took what eBay did well already, which was having a lot of inventory, and added authentication. And the same thing is Rent the Runway through this as well. If you're buying a$2 ,000 vintage Chanel jacket. Cars and bids is the same thing. Bring a trailer. Similar, but disaggregate. Because eBay Motors really was big, but people are peeling the stuff off and adding specific features. Yep. So yeah, I think as long as until something like a Backtrack or Bezel truly become dominant, there's still these opportunities to unbundle. So what do you think is more viral about this? I mean, I don't even know if this is their launch, but it's clearly their introduction to a million views and 50 ,000 fans.

53:23Do you think the concept is more viral or the execution in the sense that it's like great copywriting on a subway? And then someone wound up just taking a photo because it's a subway ad. Subway ads are always hard to price and just anything in the IRL. It's probably paid for itself. What's funny is I looked at this ad and I was like, that's so cool. Like just great campaign. And then I went to the website and it was a bunch of vintage electronics. And I was like, eh, meh. I haven't been back since. but I think this is a good example of just the power of branding and like a really good marketing campaign who knows if it'll make it an enduring business but my worry with this stuff is like a lot of the technology there is they're just appliances and it's this the car world is talking about this how like you know would you ever want an earlier model 3 or would you always just want the latest Tesla model 3 like you would always just want the latest one because it's an appliance in the same way that you would always want the latest iPhone, there's no real benefit to downgrading, as opposed to the old cars where it's like, oh yeah, like a Lamborghini Countach is going to drive in a very specific way.

54:32Yeah, the issue is you can sell the device, but you still don't really control the software. Apple can be like, we don't support this anymore. Or it just doesn't run that well. Yeah, they'll force you to upgrade, but it runs terribly. And so I think what would be an incredible product, and I don't even know if it's possible to deliver at scale is if you could actually go back and run like ios 4 on an og iphone and it would just be so fun and i mean you can get the very first iphone they're getting expensive now but it doesn't have an app store no that's a whole it just comes with what it has you get maps you know like just buying apple apple products when they're released and leaving them in the box is like the best performing asset class i don't know best performing yeah you know maybe it's not video but like it outperforms like yeah yeah they grow eventually yeah yeah so anyways good example of a good campaign and how there's not you know it's not too late to um unbundle these behemoths yeah uh in terms of the the other kind of like trad technology we we got to go back.

55:37Huge, huge push against online dating recently. Have you been following this? Oh, yeah. So it is. So somebody shared this chart of how couples meet in the United States and the online is just a rocket ship from 1990, where it's basically zero to 2020 when it's well over 50%. Now there is a community note on this that's not, it's not live, but I clicked on it because I can see what's in there. Yeah, the power. Yeah, and somebody was trying to, you know, fight it out in the community notes claiming that, oh, well, this cuts off right during COVID. Maybe it's gone down. And then they cite some other study that was done by Zola, the wedding registry.

56:17So they poll people and it said that now Zola claims that now the number one place that people meet is in school. And I just don't believe that at all relative to this chart because I think this chart is a much broader selection and I think people doing web registries on Zola is so this is this is a survey of of like 6 ,500 people randomly um by some academics and and Zola is like a very specific subset where they're like just polling their users yeah and so I imagine that if you're going on Zola and constructing like this elaborate registry you're probably like higher net worth and then probably more likely to have met in an IRL setting as opposed to online and so I I I disapprove of that community note.

57:01I think everybody can be bearish on, everybody can hate dating apps the way that people broadly know that cigarettes are bad. Yeah. But you're not going to, you know. Until there's something better comes along. Well, I don't know that dating apps are basically selling sex, which is the primary human motivation. So you're just not going to, if as long as these apps are able to offer what they're offering they're only going to become like it's interesting that um it does seem that it does seem that people are

57:45like our society is now very like from a dating standpoint dating apps are driving the majority of connections like that kind of seems like it's a thing yet people are not people can overcome the addiction the only thing more powerful than the drive to just like meet whatever for people to meet the opposite sex seemingly is finding your person and like you end up giving these people end up giving up the app afterwards right so thankfully the positive is that that it seems like you know finding your life partner wife husband whatever seems to get people to quit these things so there you can't really say that they're addictive even though they're they're dominant right I did I did have something funny so Monday I was catching up with a buddy who started started a couple different companies with a certain tech billionaire and he was telling me that said tech billionaire is upset desperately wants to fund a new version of seeking arrangements which is like the the sort of high-end you know like sugar daddy like specific dating app so maybe a contrarian move on his part like wait what is there a problem with seeking arrangements i'm assuming i'm assuming good business well i'm assuming it's one of those things where somebody looks at the design of a product and they're like this is sad better so he wants to you know accelerate sugar baby relationships.

59:15I don't even know how the economics work on there. It doesn't seem like they're probably taking a cut because that's the beauty of the OnlyFans business is that they're taking a cut of the entire economy between the simps and the women. But it's hard if there's potential for disintermediation. Yeah, but it's still fundamentally... The whole beauty of the OnlyFans model is that they never meet in person. And so it's always intermediated by a platform that can take a fee. And that's why they're so insanely profitable. What do you think of the idea of if Elon Musk wants to raise birth rates, he should purchase Match Group, the company that controls Tinder and Hinge, over half of the online dating market?

59:53Make a bunch of changes. So Elon's a capitalist. I don't think he's fundamentally, even X, yeah, he purchased it to defend free speech. but he also bought the most important marketing channel for his trillions of dollars of companies right so it's like it's hard to argue that even and also he can he can he has a great position to take which is oh I didn't buy this to make money I don't care I'm sure he'll take it public again someday he's like he can he could take it public at a loss and say look I did this for free speech whatever but let's face it he has direct control over the most important audience in the world to him and he could lose 10 billion dollars on x and make it back 10x over with spacex or tesla or whatever so it's not a i don't think he's gonna he's not the guy who honestly if he bought match group and was like i'm gonna re-engineer this to try to increase the birth rate and everything that he would do to match and their subset of companies would would destroy destroy enterprise value yeah because of course these of course the incentives are set up in a way all the way from the CEO to the the of match to the individual leaders of their different brands all the way down to the lowly product manager who's just like fuck I just want to increase the a use just 10 percent like that'll get me my next you know raise or whatever then i can go from associate i need to include increase the ctr on this one button yeah yeah yeah yeah so anyways uh match group is but it's it's funny because it's everybody wants to say that match group is all bad yet there's millions of couples out there that would never have met yeah and their lives are completely yeah like better because match group products exist of course yeah so it's one of those things like nothing is ever as good or as bad the other yeah the other interesting thing is like like you know even even if match group was in like the uh you know charitable let's call it like a charitable donation range like let's say it was like 10 million dollar company but it still had the outsized effect that it has on society uh like elon could just be like i'm going to burn 10 million dollars because i feel like changing the work or 10 million let's call it 10 million like super low like nothing like it's a rounding error for him so he he buys and he shuts it down well like that's not going to stop someone else coming in and doing the same thing like it doesn't work like that like uh there there's clearly some sort of like market demand here and you can't just You can't just go around doing this odd brand of capitalism, philanthropy mix.

1:02:54Yeah. I think the solution here – I do think people are clamoring for a solution to plummeting marriage rates and plummeting birth rates. But the answer is – Don't go after the apps. Yeah, yeah. You actually need to build a better cultural institution and figure out how that can scale and be profitable. You need to make it punishable by jail if a guy sees a girl that's cute and doesn't talk to them. In real life. In real life. Like if a guy, like if a police officer is on the street and sees a guy walking, notices a cute girl, and doesn't say, Hello, I'd like to take you out to coffee. That can be punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

1:03:3610 years in prison. I don't know if the government's going to solve this. I think we're looking for free market solutions here. And the free market solutions are probably like someone going and building something that's a really cool. I heard one person pitch, this is kind of a wild idea, CrossFit for militias. So the idea is like if you want strong militias in America, which maybe you don't, but if you do, and you want the ability of like local groups of Americans to potentially push back against the government in a negative scenario, You have some sort of organization. You could do the same thing where it's like some sort of new CrossFit community, something like that, where it's a scalable organization, but it's about something else where people can meet and bond.

1:04:23No, I want to fund Discord for local militias. Discord for local militias. There's vertical SaaS for militias. I don't even know if there are that many militias around. No, but we need to stimulate more. Okay, yeah, sure, sure, sure. So, yeah, if you could manage everything from communication to inventory to recruiting to dues to training to compliance. There's a big business to be built there. I mean, I do love the idea of... I know me and my dad group chat in the neighborhood are all early users. And yeah, and you even link it into, you know, scrape active, you know, police reports, warnings.

1:05:03You bring in citizen data. So it's basically like, you know, getting, you know, you get a push notification and then you like rip your suit off this is like full you know military I think dudes would sign up for it I do like the idea of you know like okay we're revitalizing like the American military and working with the DOD with all these defense tech companies but like what happens if we get overrun and like you know some foreign country is like on our shores like we need malicious and we just need to we need our own insurgency and we need to be prepared for that I mean fortunately we have the most guns of any country so she shouldn't she'd be going back to that going back to the fixing fixing uh the reason that i don't think uh i don't think dating i only think it's going to get i don't think it's going to get better really like i think the future that we're seeing today which is

1:06:02hyper financialized dating which is you're on this app and if you pay more money like you can have better odds at success and all this stuff but then the bigger issue is just that humans historically did not have indefinite optionality now people are so used to spending most of their time communicating online that it's not unreasonable that somebody in you know Texas would date somebody in Ohio and then like form a relationship that way but the issue is that historically humans had I think it was there's some data on until recently or until the last like couple decades most people that got married were born within like five square miles of each other or something like that yeah and that was actually positive and that people would look around and see and just like be more committal because they're like well this is the best person for me in my neighborhood yeah right or my city yeah just like oh like families here everything's here yes we should get married yeah so yeah I think that the era of optional seeing seeing the entire pool across yeah it doesn't even matter because the thing is is somebody's using dating apps and they meet somebody and then they stop using dating apps they're still gonna go on Instagram and see the same number yeah so eliminating even if you regulate or try to fold match group or whatever it's not going to stop instagram is the bigger that isn't interesting like obviously like i want the free market solution here but it would be interesting if like like legally you couldn't have a you had to have some geo restriction on uh on on the matching yeah or you can only get you can only get five matches a month yeah something like that we're yeah we're limiting matches.

1:07:58I don't think that was ever going to happen. That's why I think whatever you're seeing today is exactly what you're going to see for the most part. The relentless march of technical capital. Even the prevalence of, I don't know if this made it in the stack, but there was somebody tweeted, I think it was on the character AI Reddit and it was like so long, their favorite character that they were chatting to. I finally met someone. Thanks for thanks for uh teaching me how to talk to a woman it certainly helped so that's i guess one positive right yeah yeah it's like if if if the sort of incel audience is chatting with these ai bots and they're like damn i i low-key have game right yeah yeah i have thought about that where is this maybe maybe there's a scenario where it's like you like a boy is talking to an ai girlfriend and a girl out there is talking to an AI boyfriend and because they're on the same platform the two AIs you can kind of do a match across them and you have a lot of data to know because you know every interest about the boy because you've collected you know hours and hours of communication and you've connected hours and hours of chat blogs with the girl as well and you can look across the network and say wow these two people are actually perfect matches we should just introduce them and disintermediate.

1:09:25And then the AIs leave. And then the real life boy and girl meet. And they're like, wow, it feels like I'm talking to the AI boyfriend or AI girlfriend that I've been talking to for the last year. I'm glad I gave it so much training data. And then they meet up and it's a catfish. I've been leading my... You're talking to the AI girlfriend. You're like, yeah, I'm jacked. I can bench 400. It's like, oh, well, we have a girl over here who wants to date someone who's yeah you have to post proof right yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah it's like i'm sorry unfortunately unfortunately we've had issues on the platform with people people embellish their bench uh one rep max and we actually will need you to post proof of it yeah make sure you're in a well-lit area yeah that's clearly not using fake weights that's funny um i i want to talk about this uh this like you know zombie corns dead venture companies so uh it started with this tweet by tara or tara um very surprised at the number of founder friends who have quietly called in the last few days asking for advice on how to sell their company because they raised at too high of valuations and are now in a state of purgatory and i think you know this guy siva is that right or you you just saw him but he says he says dm or email me.

1:10:45We've bought a few companies that raged 50 to$100 million from VC and we're stuck behind a large pref stack. I've been a founder and understanding this situation is daunting and running a company with little to no upside is exhausting and demotivating. We can provide a landing spot for your company and a way for you to get a win and move on if you'd like to do other things. This is my bad signal to founders or investors that see founders stuck in these situations. So, you know, Zerp companies that is too much. Yeah, so the irony is that the person he's quote tweeting just sold her company for like a big outcome oh really yeah like that like she had a really successful exit and it catalyzed a bunch of people well i'd be like oh how do i actually i actually don't know the details but i think people did very well okay i saw like employees tweeting that were like whoa i'm rich now okay cool stuff like that so she has a big outcome bunch of people are like whoa how do i do that how do you sell your company yeah um because Because people still have this perception that, I don't know, a lot of venture-backed founders think that their company is worth something close to the last valuation that they raised at, even if they're not, or even their seed valuation.

1:11:53Whatever. But what I think is funny is you have these people. So Jeremy Gaffan was probably over a year ago, maybe at this point, he goes on Invest Like the Best. He starts talking about special situations. everybody's like whoa you've been doing like and he's giving examples of deals that they've done at tiny for a really long time where they're buying companies for less than the asset value of the business and he's calling them like log jams and special situations where he's coming in as a somewhat neutral third party saying like how do we how do we deliver what everybody wants the vc wants oftentimes to just like take a write-off or clean it up clean it up or stop having to spend any time on it if they're on the board they don't want to deal with it anymore if it's not going to return their fund so he's solving that for the vcs he's usually giving a deal to the founder that allows them and and whatever the core team is that allows them to save face and hopefully see some roi or walk away entirely if they want to do something else but i think it's funny because now you have jeremy who has his new fund um who's fully focused on this so you have to imagine he's going to be ahead of a lot of these other you know people that are coming out and and now trying to compete here but jeremy is competing with tiny capital andrew wilkinson who's still trying to do the same deals you know even though to my knowledge jeremy was the guy like really leading the charge of that practice and so all these guys who are running holding companies are basically now like doing like distressed finance you know they're just coming in like trying to find value and unfuck these situations so anyways i think it's great that these um these uh players exist in the space it's generally positive i think for pretty much all the stakeholders but the nature of everybody realizing that these are good opportunities is going to make i'm at the increased competition we'll see if it if I don't know if the venture industry has could support as many of these types of players as they can microphones right yeah I wonder I wonder what the wheelhouse deal looks like for like where where is their value when there's a log jammed like b2b sass company because I feel like if you raise some money you didn't get to product market fit but you're in the last era it's like okay well you probably aren't doing like a ai first approach you're probably doing something else maybe you have some customer list it's like i i i struggle to think of like why i personally would want to own one of these companies but yeah so so imagine a company that raised that raised uh 25 million dollars and gets to five million of arr are sure and they're not profitable in fact they're burning a lot of money sure and they stop growing yep suddenly that company is companies that don't make money and are not growing are worthless yeah especially if they're losing money yeah right of course and so you take one of these five million error businesses that's not really growing anymore and if you wipe out the prep stack massively decrease costs focus on sustainable growth you could probably sell that business for 25 million dollars in like three to five years right i'm just saying like maybe yeah i'm not saying it's easy i'm not saying without without any more without like putting up significant more capital that feels hard not necessarily though i mean so here's maybe if you're plugging into something that has like heavy synergies like sure it's like okay they have a product that we can cross out or something i'm not saying it's i'm not saying it's easy yeah but i'm just saying if you have if the five millionaire are business with a 25 million dollar pref stack that's not growing if you wipe out the press stack reduce costs and find a way to grow sustainably and then you get profitable and then in five years you go to a strategic and you say like hey you guys should actually buy this for 50 million dollars because it's accretive to your business yep the person that bought the business for five whatever you paid five million dollars for it you're gonna do great yeah so that's why all these people are circling being like hmm yeah like yeah i really want to see the the the like the histogram it's actually it's actually good to give VCs love to add value via intros yeah and so Siva and Jeremy and Andrew are all gonna be like pretty much buddy buddy with all the VCs yeah getting those getting those calls and intros hey hey this company's all there might be yeah I just wonder I just wonder I'm like the histogram like how much capital is going into each deal is there any other structure is it just is just well yeah the other thing here is that these funds can leverage debt yeah so if you're buying a business you know there's totally possible you could buy a business for five million of ARR with five million of ARR for two million dollars of cash yeah three million dollars of debt and if you sell the business for $25 million, it's a pretty good multiple on your cash.

1:17:07It's just, it is kind of high stakes. It's kind of high stakes because like you got to cut costs fast to pay for the debt. And then you've now cut costs and now you have to grow. Yeah. And while maintaining margins in this new era, because you're not like this hot company trading at some premium, everyone knows you're like this turnaround. It's tricky. I like it though, because it's a simple, it's a simple strategy that you can have real advantages through your network and credibility yeah because jeremy's done a bunch of these deals yeah i don't know it doesn't seem like that's simple of a strategy more seems like something that jeremy's really good at fun these fun thesis sure sure sure very difficult to execute yeah yeah but it's important it's much worse to have a very complex fun thesis yeah and a very complex execution sure sure at least have one of them be simple yeah yeah one of them complicated yeah um so yeah because I don't know there's just not that many nobody right now nobody wants to buy a business that's for the most part it's not that strategic to buy if you have a company that's working it's not that strategic to buy a cost center but if you can turn it into like a profit center and something that's accretive yeah

1:18:25it's interesting I wonder how much of the hack and slash is actually going to go on. The what? I wonder how much hack and slash is actually going to go on in those deals. Twitter is kind of the famous example of a really bloated company, 5 ,000 employees. It's now below 2 ,000. It's getting closer to 1 ,000. That is remarkable. But when I'm thinking about a$25 million raise, it's like, well, maybe they got to, what, 50 employees? So they could go down to 10? could they go down 20 like maybe yeah like that doesn't seem well the hard thing is if you're going after these SaaS companies or consumer apps or whatever they are you're still at five million of revenue and trying to be super capital efficient yeah you're still threatened by all the next YC batch exactly we're building SaaS for you know with AI it's like the next hot thing and they're gonna burn money to like acquire those same customers that is really tough yeah but if you've found some nation and like the revenues are pretty strong and sticking around.

1:19:27It's just interesting. There's the, um, the startup community generally has this attitude that anything's possible. And when they think of private equity, they're like, oh yeah, you just buy companies for one price and sell them for more. And like, look at this deal. Like, what if you did that with this, whatever. Um, but private equity credit to the gentleman that we know in that industry, there's not a lot of efficiencies that you can get in private equity. The edge that these guys have is relationships to investors and being able to speak to founders. And that's why this content marketing is like, I've been in your shoes.

1:20:11I understand. I've been there, done that. They're going to actually, yeah, so their edge is that private traditional PE funds are not looking at these companies as much, and they do not give a shit how the founder feels. Yeah. So that is an edge by itself, just caring about the founder. Let's do this one. Do you know this guy? Byrne Hobart? I love this guy. He just wrote this book for Stray Press on bubbles. He's going to be a heretic on. Good dude. He's pro-bubble. Amazing. Who is not? Yeah. He believes that - Please, just one more bubble. Yeah, I actually told him about that on a call. Yeah.

1:20:58And he was like, yeah. And he has an interesting theory that in fact, it is not the main street investor that gets burnt when a bubble collapses. Because if you look at wealth inequality during financial collapses and recessions, wealth inequality decreases. Interesting. Because on average, the main street investor invests on a much more regular cadence. It's the professional investor that's actually winning and losing more dramatically at scale. Yeah, it's very fascinating. Because the narrative is typically like, oh, the financier, the rich guys dumped on retail. But that's not really what happens if you just look at the broader, broader picture.

1:21:48It's certainly true in the micro. Some people got dumped on. Some people dumped. But more broadly, the economic equality actually goes down during crashes. But I love this tweet. It didn't get very many views, but I thought it was very interesting. It says, there's a dubious microcap I've looked at that makes a hangover cure that you're supposed to drink at the same time you drink alcohol. The main active ingredient is caffeine. So what they really sell is deconstructed Four Loko. Can't tell if that's a bull or bear case. When's the last time you had a Four Loko? College. Damn, I'm sorry. Yeah.

1:22:21you haven't had opportunities since then maybe at hereticon we should crack we should crack open on stage yeah solano was telling me that he was like i showed him i showed him the document and he was like he was like there's one problem my control f for four loco and it wasn't in this doc so we definitely have to get some real ones that's so great 100 i mean and we'll do an ad read for four loco yeah yeah it's perfect um yeah i i remember like you know when the four loco ban happened like you know everyone was kind of stockpiling like a case or two but the original four loco is like impossible to acquire but it's the original yeah the original formula i mean it really is rare it's rarer than your than your you know first generation iphone that's on still in the box can you imagine driving through some forgotten town somewhere in america and you pull up to a gas station and you're thirsty thirsty i don't think thirst has anything to do with it you're thirsty and you go to look in you go to look in the fridge and you look back and you're like what is that it's like it's not even refrigerated it's like everything's lukewarm or whatever oh yeah it's dust okay you like scrape it off and it says like and it says expired in like 2008 yeah it was like 2009 and you just immediately like start hitting it against your head it's like water it's like a mirage in the desert i don't have any negative memories of four loco i certainly wasn't my go-to but i think it was a great product and it's a shame that it got regulated out of existence yeah well what well what about uh bull or bear case i will tell you that this company is truly a micro cap I dm'd him and asked him and it's about a 50 million dollar company it should be smaller whatever their earnings are it should be should be smaller yeah I mean the thing with the deconstructed for loco is like that already kind of exists the Red Bull vodka and then the gentleman's Red Bull vodka which of course is the espresso martini and so the the idea of mixing caffeine and alcohol people do this regularly they find ways to do it this is classic the question is like yeah Will people really pick up on this?

1:24:34Because they are explicitly triggering people to consume caffeine when they're drinking. Yeah, there's another one of these hangover cures. Hangover cures or fixes are funny because you're basically saying that... I'm irresponsible, but I'm responsible enough to buy a hangover cure. These are great cups. That's really tough, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, it's always hard to be. No, the real reason is you're saying you just poisoned yourself. Here's an antidote. Antidotes don't promise that you're going to feel good. They promise that you're going to live, you know. Okay. And so that's like the theory of an antidote.

1:25:17So, yeah, to me, you're just commit to drinking is going to make you feel worse than you otherwise would. Temporarily, maybe better and then worse. So I think it's, I've never, I've never invested in any of the companies that have, there's clearly demand. Yeah. I have a friend who runs one. It's doing pretty well. They focus on like weddings too. That's like a bit of growth area because everyone's going to be drinking at the wedding. So if you can get into the wedding planner network, then the wedding planner can present this as like, oh, this would be a lovely gift for everyone. You put it in a little gift bag when they arrive, they take it before they drink.

1:25:53It's actually like a biotech company. they have like really good science and so it's this enzyme that breaks down the alcohol it really does work yeah z-biotics uh have you tried somebody was telling me that z-biotics is like i won't i don't want to misspeak and i don't want to talk poorly about anyone's um a for-profit enterprise yeah but uh but yeah no no you know i tried z-biotics and i was like this didn't work didn't work and uh you know i don't know i'm very i'm very affected by alcohol though pretty much yeah the next time i drink alcohol and probably the only time in q4 will be at heretic on sure uh on stage yeah exactly yeah um yeah yeah it is it is always hard because it's like if you have the forethought to think of taking a pre-alcohol uh hangover cure you also might have the forethought to like mix in a glass of water or just drink glass so it's a very tough business bigger dinner yeah or drink more water i mean any any business that's or have your blood like any business that's predicated on like you doing less of like the seven deadly sins is always tricky like you know the the dating app that's not predicated on just more and more casual sex yeah that's going to struggle to me to me if i was going to invest in a um hangover cure it would be somebody recreating john mcafee's like protocol which is that no you should pull it up and you should pull this up or put it on the screen or something um but his protocol is like you know how he always like well whenever he does a video and he's no longer with us yeah but well allegedly allegedly yeah he's probably listening to this right now yeah um the he'll go on these rants where he's like how did i drink four bottles of gin a day for six years in a row and and you know still managed to hold the federal government hostage for 200 days in a row and he had outlined this like crazy biohacker stack that he's on that like is like helping with his liver and all this other stuff and so he actually had it dialed so like the mcafee stack is if somebody wants to build that i'll back that back that because it clearly works okay i was like drinking like we gotta do a deep dive he wasn't just partying he was drinking yeah he he he's like he's like putting as much effort as brian johnson is into into surviving but also like into just refusing to not drink yeah yeah it's great like the easiest win possible yeah yeah how can i how can i survive Well, no, probably like, yeah, it would have still doing the single worst thing I can possibly do for my body.

1:28:41Yeah. Wow. What do you think of this? Dennis says, you're busy trying to get into founder mode while the 18 year old Zoomer clipping Kai Sonat and Aiden Ross on TikTok has a higher ARR than your entire B2B SaaS startup. Why do you like this one so much? I mean, I just think that, I just think it's amazing. If you could go back in time and tell Ben Franklin that some 18-year-old, you know, 18-year-old would be making millions, he would be like, yeah, that was what I envisioned for America. It is interesting. You know, to go back to Jeremy Giffon. By the way, Giffon is... Is it Giffon? No, I think...

1:29:26How do you say it? Giffon. Giffon. But it's so funny because his favorite business ever is like Lazard. Yeah. And Giffon just happens to feel like it's already in the same realm of – Is that the fun name? Giffon Capital? Giffon and Company. And Company? Yeah, yeah. There you go. Which is great. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, yeah. I mean, he told me this one interesting thing was like he just – like one of the highest signal data points that you can get on a founder when they're young and you're thinking about backing them for the first time, they've never done a business before, is just show me a Stripe account with money coming in and simultaneously a high school report card that happened the same time.

1:30:15Like all I care about is like you made money while in high school. Yeah, let me show you this picture. And that is a great signal. And I think that it's interesting because this seems ridiculous, the 18-year-old Zoomer clipping Kai Sinat and Aiden Ross clips on TikTok. But that 18-year-old Zoomer is probably the next great B2B SaaS founder. Like, probably. Like, not unreasonable to back that person. You evolved from the lowest common denominator. Yeah. And that is going to get retconned from this low-status clipping Aiden Ross clips on TikTok to, oh, yeah, I had a social media management company.

1:30:53or oh yeah i i you know i had a did i ever show you this picture no this is my first company okay let me see um yeah j man designs okay so literally when i was 12 i figured out that i could get skateboards manufactured in the midwest for 17.50 wow and i got my mom's help designing a graphic and i got i raised the money from my aunt who gave me like 500 bucks for the first round and I bought a bunch of boards and my number one sales channel was friends birthday parties. So when my friend's birthday was coming up, I'd go to their parent and I would sell them a skateboard at$40 or$36 or whatever.

1:31:35I was making like 50 % margins. I should have gone higher. A lot of flexibility. Yeah, you got a Zillow in the house show up. Actually, it's a$200 skateboard. It's a$200 skateboard. No, but that was like the first way that I made money that wasn't mowing lawns or whatever. It's truly entrepreneurial. The formative experience for an entrepreneur, it's one thing to do a service like copywriting or any of these other graphic design, but buying a product for one price and all you do is resell it for something else. This is my first job too. My first entrepreneurial thing was buying DJ equipment in America and then selling it on eBay and being willing to ship internationally.

1:32:16and so figuring out that certain companies with this very niche DJ equipment didn't have the infrastructure set up to distribute internationally and so I would just be like yeah I'll go figure out all the stupid custom stuff and a lot of people that wanted the best audiophile gear would be like dude if you can buy this for me and I will pay the extra shipping cost and the premium to do it and you just go figure all that stuff out and it's only possible because of the internet Yeah, and fundamentally, I still bring that up to founders when they're thinking they're like trying to over philosophize their businesses.

1:32:53I'm like, are you making something for one price that you will be able to sell for more than that price? And if so, how much more? And if, depending on the market, that's either going to lead to you creating a big business based on the margin profile or not. yeah yeah and so many people forget that and and i've forgotten that at multiple points in my adult life of fundamentally it's about making something for one price selling it for more than yeah just starting with like a basic widgets business and somebody's gonna clip this and be like two guys discover business basically like here's the thing so like if i have this piece of paper right and i can get this paper yeah and you're willing to pay two dollars for this this uh print out of a tweet yeah um what else do we have we have a couple more things i wanted to see um did you actually dig into this story about mark andresen giving 50k in bitcoin to an ai agent yeah i did it was over uh it was dramatized by an ai doomer yeah dramatized by an ai doomer turns out like the money like went into an account and like was never actually touched it's not like the ai was like i'm gonna use this to do that it was just sort of like mark sends it yep and then um calling calling mark mark this reminds me somebody i was at dinner the other night and and somebody brought up epstein and for some reason i was like unrelated and i called him i was like no but jeffrey would have why are you calling him jeffrey like what's wrong with you is there something that we need to know um yeah but yeah i think just just there's going to be more examples of this where people are like look yeah it's sentient the problem with the truth terminal thing i mean it seems really cool i hope that it's like real and someone's actually doing stuff it seems like a very avant-garde art project but you never know again teleoperation is there a human in the loop here so even even with the And there's an incentive to be like, oh, if people think this is an AI.

1:35:03They like it more because the bar is lower. It's like what we discussed the other day about the AI influencers are making 50K on Instagram, OnlyFans or whatever. And it turns out it's just a real woman. But if a real woman says, oh, these are AI generated, people are like, oh, this is incredible. This is the best AI model I've ever seen. And there's going to be a lot of that, like faking it both in the teleoperation, both in this. and just having a filter there. It is interesting. Are you familiar with like Move 37, this whole story? So when Google deep mind, Demis Hasibus was trying to beat Lisa Dahl in Go, the Go master.

1:35:44So computers had beaten chess and they'd become superhuman at chess, but Go was computationally much more complex. So something like, you know, instead of being like trillion possible board positions, that you could potentially search with a supercomputer, it's like quadrillion to quadrillion. So it's like impossible to just brute force it. But they applied deep learning, scale, they trained and they played billions of simulated games. And eventually the AI became very good. Everyone thought that Lisa Dahl, who was the world champion, was going to wipe the floor and he wound up losing. They made a whole documentary about it.

1:36:19It was crazy. And in there, there's this moment where they're playing and at move 37 the the computer deep mind places this piece like way off of the board where like no one not off the board but like it's a legal position it's just a very weird play like no one would ever do this no human would ever do this and and everyone was very confused they're like oh there's like a bug in the software like something's weird about this um uh but and at least it all like got up and was like what the fuck is going on like this is weird like i don't get this this is not how people play this game and that move wound up being critical and they won because of this move so it was like yeah true discovery of like a novel strategy and that is like what we're looking for in intelligence when you say like an ai system is intelligent and superhuman that's where we're getting there and with llms yeah the real the thing that would be interesting is if there was this AI agent that was figuring out a way to crack open multi-sigs on Solana.

1:37:23Oh, yeah. Or something like that. Again, there was a rumor about that too, but very unlikely. But even like, so these Move 37 type moments, I've been waiting for something to happen where it's just like a sentence, a poem, a paragraph, something that feels like inspired and like a viral tweet that clearly provably came from an LOM. We won't know that OpenAI has reached singularity until an agent built on the OpenAI platform buys a McLaren P1 to gain the favor of Altman. P1 or F1? Well, I think he would. He'd respect that. He's respectful. Yeah. But I don't know. It's interesting. It's definitely getting a response from the crazy AI doomers.

1:38:21Doomers. Doomers going to doom. But I like that Mark, like, you know, YOLO'd 50K to this project. Like, that's fun. That's what he should be doing. Like, that's awesome. I'm excited. Increase it by an order of magnitude. Probably on the next run, you know. Did you read Sequoia's generated AI thing? Their whole paper? application layer is important a bit too serious for our bones i think so no it is it is it's so long but here's here's the funny thing the only thing that i'll comment on that is it feels like a year ago everybody was like the application doesn't matter building at the application layer it's just yeah rappers are stupid rappers are stupid and now it's like all in on rappers but then a year from now i think it'll be back to oh you know like i don't know it's just funny to think that that only like six to twelve months ago people were saying that software is dead the end of software so this report is coming within six months of the end of software yep so who's right both both of them are right you know like that's honestly it's honestly my opinion is is I think that long-term both of them are right and that software is gonna be massively disruptive yeah but there's still going to be massive value accrual to specific products.

1:39:36Yeah. I mean, the computing hardware companies were valuable and the software built on top of them was valuable after the dot-com boom. Yeah. And even the telecom companies were pretty valuable. Yeah. And so the whole stack is valuable. And there's probably value accruing all over the place. It's great. Everywhere you look. I mean, it really is. It makes sense that the value accrual wouldn't live just only one place. Of course, there's going to be a winner, but from a venture perspective. Everybody's incentive that anybody that's running a foundation model is incentivized to say, we're going to capture all the value.

1:40:08We're going to do all these things that you say you're going to do. We're just going to do it innately through the core technology. And then everybody that wants to deploy money is, is saying you want it. It's, it's, it's much more comforting to be able to say that the value is going to accrue to individual teams and products and apps and things like that, because then you can YOLO bets, you know? Yeah, the question is like, and I don't know if they address this that much, but disruptive innovation versus sustaining. Like will the existing, because there's already a crop, there's already a, you know, a multi-billion dollar SaaS company in every major category.

1:40:52And so there's also now a YC company doing AI in that category as well. is AI disruptive to those companies that are maybe only five, 10 years old and doing well? Like, I mean, you know, Ramp is like, they're not being disrupted by AI. They're like the first one to implement it because like they're still on the cutting edge. They still have the agile team, right? And I wonder, yeah, how much of this is going to be completely new versus just the existing tech companies are able to just roll in. I don't know. Keep an eye on it. Anything else?

1:41:30there's always more technology always more technology i think we got through most of the tweets

1:41:40i have been using those uh meta glasses more the the ray-bans yeah yeah the video ones i with the kids i went for a walk uh and had my hands full with dogs and babies and it was great you know take some photos the photos are not that great But the thing that I actually liked was being able to just talk to the AI while you're walking around hands-free You just say like hey meta like what's the you know, what year was the Declaration of Independence signed or whatever? Yeah It just gives you it just gives you like little facts and stuff and it's like a little bit easier than pulling out your phone for like the random question Yeah, I think that's kind of cool getting you become the cell tower that data is being transmitted.

1:42:21Yeah, you're going to have that. I actually watched a Huburn clip about that. EMS? Yeah. And he had someone on who was like a brain scientist and who was basically like, it's chill. So, you know, I think there's like the scientists agree. Now the bro scientists agree. But like we got to come up with a new tier for like even more conspiratorial tinfoil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The tinfoil bros. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The tin men. Just the bros, not bro scientists. Just bros. Don't even pretend to be a scientist. We should have a tinfoil hat in the background from here. Just like a really, really high quality one.

1:43:00Anyway, I think we crushed it. We did all this stuff. Let's wrap there. Jordy, did you want to talk about the wall? Oh. Ending our potential vice president bragging about not. Knowing what a VC is? The thing is, here's the funny thing. Politicians used to be able to travel around the country saying whatever they wanted to specific audiences with zero consequences. Oh, yeah. And now almost every single talk that a politician's ever going to have is going to be clipped and almost immediately published. And even, you know, they're always running the risk of being clipped out of context. Yep. But Tim Walls can't, you can't go and speak to a bunch of guys that work.

1:43:45Work, you know, he's clearly pandering to a specific audience of being like, well, the funny thing with Tim Wall is the guy says he doesn't own any stocks or any financial instruments. He doesn't have retirement savings. He's just planning to live off of the government forever. Like he came out and said, yeah, he has his pension from being in the government or whatever. He says he has no, he sold his house. He doesn't have any. He's all in. Like the guy's all in. You gotta give him credit for that. But he has zero exposure to stocks, the market or whatever. So this is the guy, this is, you know, the, um, it was a Dan Loeb who is, who is tweeting and saying like, is this the guy that we really want, you know, making decisions around, you know, the economy and, you know, whatever.

1:44:28But yeah, Tim Wall is going and, you know, he's probably speaking to some group of like, I don't know, agriculture, manufacturing, manufacturing, where the VCs aren't in that state at all. So apparently the guy I'm running against is a venture capitalist. Yeah. I don't know what, I don't even know what a venture capital is. And it's like, dude, you can't, even if you, even if that's true, if you want to win this race, like, why are you going and bragging about something? There's literally a fairly large constituency of like VCs for, for your campaign, VCs for Kamala. And then also it's like the Obama administration, the, the, the organization that they met with outside the government more than any other during the administration was Google.

1:45:07Like the democratic party is like well entrenched with tech and venture capital. Like this is like well established. and so yeah playing this like oh i don't even know what that is yeah i feel like he's been the last week has been interesting for him where there was a pic of that or not the picture the video of him going hunting i didn't even see that where he's trying to show that he's a good old boy that loves guns and stuff like that to sort of you know get the mail vote but back to back of blowing it with them because it was clear he didn't know how to load his shotgun and then straight into saying he doesn't know what a venture capital is is like you're kind of alienating both crowds of guys that know how to load a gun and then guys that know what venture capital is and i think that middle group that doesn't know what either is is not going to be that influential in your election but anyways that's enough politics um i'm looking forward to the next episode yeah me too thanks for listening thanks for listening